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PHAROS is introduced as a real-time-centric hardware/software co-design framework for spatially partitioned heterogeneous accelerators (HAs) in safety-critical embedded systems. It incorporates preemption mechanisms and scheduler designs (FIFO and EDF) along with a soft real-time (SRT) schedulability-oriented design space exploration (DSE). Experiments demonstrate that PHAROS finds more feasible configurations and improves real-time performance compared to throughput-oriented DSE baselines.
Guaranteeing real-time performance in safety-critical embedded systems is now easier with a new framework that co-designs hardware and software for heterogeneous accelerators.
Spatially partitioned heterogeneous accelerators (HAs) are increasingly adopted in embedded systems for their performance and flexibility. Yet most existing HA design frameworks optimize primarily for throughput or quality-of-service (QoS) metrics. They often overlook safety-critical real-time requirements, including hardware support for predictable execution, real-time-aware design space exploration (DSE), and rigorous schedulability analysis. These requirements are essential in safety-critical applications such as smart transportation, where schedulability guarantees directly affect system safety. To address this gap, we present PHAROS, a real-time-centric HA design framework. PHAROS introduces preemption mechanisms and scheduler designs for spatially partitioned HAs under first-in-first-out (FIFO) and earliest-deadline-first (EDF) policies. Leveraging modern real-time theory, we further develop a soft real-time (SRT) schedulability-oriented DSE with objectives and constraints tailored to SRT schedulability. Through comprehensive modeling, analysis, and evaluation across diverse applications, we show that PHAROS's DSE discovers more feasible configurations for a broader range of task sets than throughput-oriented DSE baselines while delivering improved real-time performance. We also provide response-time analyses for the supported scheduling algorithms.
